An executive by day. A founder by night. A near-million-dollar business built in the cracks of a normal life.
Faris ripped his first pack and pulled his favorite player. Nothing on this site — no spec sheet, no growth chart, no million-dollar headline — beats this thirty seconds.
"Cards are just cardboard until you watch your kid pull his guy." — Sam & Faris · Sports Repack
The kitchen table is covered in penny sleeves, top loaders, and a tape gun with a half-broken handle. I open the Mercury app and stare at the number for a long time. $312.
That's how Sports Repack started. Not in a glass conference room. Not with a deck. Not with a runway. $312 in a checking account at 1:47 a.m. on a Tuesday in February 2022 — three years into a side hobby I almost quit a dozen times.
I'm Sanim "Sam" Matin. By day, I'm a senior tech executive — most recently COO of Data-Tech, one of the fastest-growing tech companies in Tampa Bay. I sit in board rooms. I lead teams. I'm responsible for budgets bigger than most card collections will ever be worth.
Before that, 21 years scaling companies across Tampa, Orlando, Miami, and Boca Raton. Finance, operations, acquisitions, executive leadership. The kind of resume that gets recognized at galas — Tampa Bay Business Journal CFO of the Year, Titan 100, USF Digital Marketing Advisory Board.
But none of that is where this story actually started.
It started in Wellington, Florida. I was eight years old. Forest Hill Elementary, then Forest Hill Middle. There was a card shop tucked into a strip on the corner of our community, right next to an Eckerds drugstore that doesn't exist anymore. My cousins and I would bike over after school — pockets full of allowance money, scraping together enough for a single pack of '93 Topps or '95 Upper Deck.
We didn't know we were building anything. We were just kids who couldn't put the cards down. Trading on driveways. Arguing over which Penny Hardaway was the rare one. Riding home with a hot card we knew we'd flip the next day. That's where the obsession started. Decades before there was a Whatnot, a Heat Check Approved sticker, or a $100 Premium pack. Decades before I knew "side hustle" was a phrase.
That kid never went away. He just had to wait twenty-something years for the world to make Sports Repack possible.
And by night, I'm something else. The guy at the kitchen table at midnight with a tape gun. The guy on Whatnot lives at 8 PM EST. The guy who built Sports Repack from $9K in 2020 to nearly $1M in 2026 — without ever quitting his day job.
I never raised money. I never had a viral moment. I never had a head start. I had ten to fifteen hours a week. That's all you have, too.
Two decades in finance, operations, and executive leadership. Recognition I'll always be grateful for. A career most people would call "the goal."
The one I couldn't stop. The one that turned cardboard into a near-million-dollar business. The one that taught me what business actually looks like outside a glass tower.
The story you're reading is the trailer. The book is the receipts. 50 years of obsession. $1.7M spent learning. The exact playbook that turned $9K into $1M, working ten hours a week.
No funding. No team. Ten to fifteen hours a week.
"I built a million-dollar business in the
cracks of normal life.
So can you."
Trade shows. Card prep. Shipments. The unsexy hours nobody sees.
Today: a working studio in Tampa Bay. Tomorrow: card shops on every Florida corner.
Our first retail footprint isn't a card shop. It's a co-branded coffee shop. Tampa Bay's only spot where you can pull a pack and sip a latte. Built with our friends at Kiss and Tell Cafe — community over everything.
Eight Florida cities. Three years. The Modern Niche Empire — built one neon sign at a time.
"Most people don't fail because they lack opportunity.
They fail because they never start.
I wrote a book to help you start."